Intermediate Maths Challenge

[TheSecondOfHerName]

Anyone's DC take part in the open round this morning?

DS2 felt that it went well.

Last year he did quite well in the Junior one (gold certificate in the open round and a merit in the Olympiad) but he was in the oldest year group taking part. This year he is in the youngest year group for the Intermediate one, competing with children two years above.

You practise them - UKMT have lots of past papers available. Nrich and AoPS have good resources too: anything that makes you turn your brain on rather than just turn a handle is good!

I don't think many practise challenges - but they do help. For the olympiads, if they look like they may be able to get into them at some point. one good way to get more confident is to ask the school to put them on a mentoring scheme. Or if you are reasonably confident you could do a previous years mentoring scheme which come with answers: intermediate mentoring the disadvantage is the lack of being able to discuss it with someone.

I asked DS about this and he just grunted.

He was one mark off the next level last year.

I can't remember, how long does it take to get scores back?

Web page says "We aim to return the results to schools within six weeks, but where we have a valid email address we will email the results within three weeks."
www.ukmt.org.uk/individual-competitions/intermediate-challenge/

OhYouBadBadKitten Thank you for explaining. When you say the top 500 scoring children from each year group, do you mean the top 500 scores from the open round (that happened yesterday) or the top 500 scores from the kangaroo? Thanks.

Yeah, by the end of the month I think, because the intermediate olympiads are 10 March (I just looked!).

Ds says he reckons 113/135 - I tutted

I've now read the link and seen that it contains the answer to my question. I doubt that DS2 will qualify for the Olympiad this year, but he might qualify for the kangaroo.

Each year group Second. Generally the kangaroo is on the same day as the olympiads, although this year it seems to be the week after. The kangaroo is a sort of consolation round, rather than a step to go through.

Consolation sounds really patronising, sorry. Am blanking on a better way to put it. It requires a different style of answers than the Olympiad questions.

The kangaroo is an international competition, so its pretty cool :)

I shouldn't post whilst trying to leave the house. Yes, the Kangaroo is huge, isn't it? A parallel competition is a more accurate way to describe it

DD (y10) did this. They do no practice at all at their school, so I'm amazed if they get beyond the 1st round!
Also it was in the same day as the 1st French GCSE speaking assessment, so most students were focussed in the French more than the maths

Is this the thing that happened last Thursday morning? She did mention it in passing...if so, DD1 did it on account of her (artificially) high maths set needing to balance her
(spot on) English set in year 10. I
asked her how it had gone. She answered that she spent 3 minutes
guessing the answers then the rest
of the time thinking about story openers :-)

its usual not to practise in most schools, its supposed to be fun!

DD offered that it definitely was not "Fun."

DS2's school don't practise for it. I have heard of other schools using the past papers as an enrichment activity.

Lol Iamnot ! Nice for her to have a bit of free time then I think my son may spend his English lessons thinking about maths ... this would explain a few things ...

And no, none of my kids' schools do any practice for it.

For a bit of fun, I've got DH doing this... He's 5 minutes in and making the sort of grunts and groans I normally associate with a bout of Man Flu.......

His face was a picture when I told him he wasn't allowed a calculator....

Has he finished yet?

Yes... he scraped the Kangaroo.... Wonder if DS (Yr 9) will trump him!

To AtiaoftheJulii,

DS's school doesn't offer practice. When he took the first one in Y7, I did buy the past paper and asked him to do it. Then we don't do anything now, as he does it every year, I guess the excitment run out.

DS did team one in y8&9 as well, which he enjoyed, as they travel to London to do the last round.

No, I didn't mean at school, just for his own satisfaction. That's a shame though, that you think the excitement's run out. Does he have the book, "A Problem Solver's Handbook"? shop.ukmt.org.uk/ Discussions of how to approach intermediate olympiad problems, plus loads of questions arranged by topic and difficulty. Interesting and useful if you like that sort of thing

Boundaries are out: very similar to last year, bronze slightly higher, gold slightly higher, olympiads practically identical. DS safely through, though yes, TMC comes first here. AutumnSky, hopefully your DS may get to do the senior team challenge at some point, which might reignite his enthusiasm? It sounds as though the IMC is too easy for him - if his school isn't already entering him for the SMC, I'd ask them to do so (somewhere in the SMC to BMO1 to BMO2 to further selection tests to International Mathematical Olympiad path, with any luck he'd find a level that's not boring!) UKMT have nothing against pupils in lower years than the target years doing their challenges, though not all schools seem to realise that's a possibility.

one of those "higher"s should have been "lower", wish we could edit...